


Restitutio ad integrum

by AirgiodSLV



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:22:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28251597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: To his credit, the Warden didn’t look confused to see me. He didn’t even look surprised.“I thought they might start pairing us in exams,” he said.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 34
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Restitutio ad integrum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ladymercury_10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladymercury_10/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Ladymercury_10! Thank you for letting me nerd out with my favorite psychometric mystery pals.
> 
> Thank you to C for beta reading and cheerleading.
> 
> Warnings: Biological weaponry, medical treatment, seizures.

To his credit, the Warden didn’t look confused to see me. He didn’t even look surprised.

“I thought they might start pairing us in exams,” he said. We’d discussed the likelihood before, but since our coursework was on different tracks and overseen by different examination boards, a shared test hadn’t been practical. “What do you have today?”

“Neuro and sensorimotor,” I answered. My exam instructions hadn’t required the withholding of that information, and it was likely the Warden would need it. I didn’t bother to ask him in turn; I had his schedule memorized. Advanced Diagnosis using Vector Sigils. He’d been doodling them on the top of his shuck for weeks whenever we quizzed each other on impairments.

The Warden pushed his glasses up his nose and looked around the room with interest. It was small and spare; I’d measured it at four paces by three paces, and there was nothing in it besides a treatment table and a basic medical field kit. I’d done an inventory while waiting, and everything was accounted for.

“Did they give you any instructions? Mine were to diagnose and treat. They must be bringing us a patient.”

I’d had a feeling that I knew what was going on; that statement confirmed it. I was disappointed to find that my stomach dropped at this certainty, though it should have been a relief. No, it was. I knew the rules of the exam now, and what we had to do. I told myself it wasn’t as cruel as the deliberate misinformation we’d been given a few years ago in final exams. It didn’t really help.

I told the Warden, “You’ve got one.”

He looked startled, but then his eyes widened, locked with mine. He didn’t waste any time; neither of us knew how much we had. “Symptoms?”

I’d been hyper-aware of myself since I’d been put into this room, and felt I could answer with confidence, “None yet.” I was thinking furiously now, putting together all of the pieces the Warden might need. “Exposure between now and fifteen minutes ago. Aerosol or injected toxin.” I didn’t think it had been injection, but I couldn’t be sure and couldn’t rule it out. A necromancer could have tagged me with a splinter of contaminated bone so small I might have missed it.

“Not ingested?” The Warden had the med kit open and was taking stock as I had, setting out the items that would likely be most useful on the exam table.

“Nothing since breakfast an hour ago. It’s possible, but unlikely.” Everything I’d had to eat and drink had been from the buffet in the dining hall, and while an impairment targeted to my genetics was certainly possible, it seemed irresponsible to have poisoned me. I’d been sitting in this room for fifteen minutes, waiting; the most likely delivery method was through the air vents.

“Skin contact?” Palamedes was frowning at the med kit, but I doubted he was seeing it. I knew that look; he was mentally paging through class notes and textbook chapters.

I shook my head. Then, because I had to, I said, “They had me sign a waiver.”

That brought his head up, his attention fixed on me. “Terms?”

My throat felt dry, but I didn’t swallow. My voice was level when I answered, “Up to and including fatality.”

I watched him go pale. Then he said, “That’s not going to happen. Let’s get to work.”

\+ + +

My first avenue of inquiry was the air vents. There were two in the room that I’d seen; one low to the floor and another in the corner by the ceiling. The Warden wanted me to stand still in the center of the room while he drew sigils around me with bone chalk, but we needed more information.

“They’re not going to make it that easy,” I told him, crouching down beside the floor vent to study it. “Anyway, you could spend hours testing for impairments without finding the right one. Do you know which vent in these rooms is intake, and which is exhaust?”

“We’re on the third floor in the lab wing. There’s another room on the other side of that wall; I remember passing the door. How large is this room?”

I told him, and he hummed. “Building code requires 3.3 meters between intake and exhaust unless the intake vent is placed 1 meter above the exhaust.”

I didn’t need to look up to check the distance. “That’s more than enough.”

“And it’s a new code revision. I don’t know how old the rooms are in this wing.” The Warden sounded apologetic, as though he should have been studying architecture in all of the spare time we had between other lessons. “Can you feel anything?”

I couldn’t, but that didn’t surprise me; they wouldn’t be circulating an airborne toxin if they had pumped one in here when I’d first arrived. The vents were scrupulously clean; I couldn’t tell whether the dust had settled on one side or another. Then I remembered what dust was made of.

“Epidermal evidence?” I asked.

He only needed a fraction of a second. “Exhaust.”

I stood up and gazed thoughtfully at the intake vent, which was more than a meter out of our reach. “Could you run an assessment without us detaching the grille?”

“Not using sigils. We could push the table into the corner?”

We tried; it was bolted securely to the floor, and nothing in the med kit could have freed it. “You could pry the vent out of the wall using this,” I suggested, proffering a blood spike from the kit.

The Warden regarded it dubiously. “Can you hold me up?”

I gave him a look.

“Right, sorry,” he said immediately. “Let’s give it a go.”

We experimented with methods for boosting him up to the correct height, and finally had him climb onto my shoulders from the treatment table. I crossed the room slowly and steadily, and the Warden managed to hold mostly still until we reached the wall, where he went to work on the grille.

There were scraping and grunting noises from over my head, and I wanted to look up but focused on holding myself perfectly balanced instead, holding the Warden steady.

“Stuck. Damn. Maybe I can...no, that’s…” There was a pause, and then the Warden said, “It’s not cheating if they didn’t ban it in the instructions.”

“Do not fail us out of this exam,” I warned him, but he only rattled and clanged at the vent for a while longer, and then something dropped into my hair.

I didn’t flinch. The Warden said, “Oops,” and then, “Screw.”

“No thanks,” I replied automatically. He didn’t laugh, but then neither of us was especially in the mood for humor.

“That’s got it. Coming down,” he told me, and I turned and walked in a straight line back to the table, only slightly more wobbly than our initial trip to the vent. The Warden climbed down from my shoulders and set our prize onto the table. “There might not be any residue,” he mused.

“They haven’t had a chance to clean it,” I pointed out, and he nodded in agreement.

“Only one way to find out. Pass me the chalk, will you?”

It was already in my hand.

\+ + +

We couldn’t learn anything from the air vent, but the Warden wasn’t discouraged. He excelled when solving a puzzle, and was even better under pressure. Standing around feeling useless discouraged him; having a task sent him leaping into action, although in his case the action was almost entirely mental. Physical leaping was why he had me.

“Take off your robe,” he advised when he finally straightened up from examining the vent.

I had it halfway off, following his instructions, before I asked, “Why?”

“It may limit exposure to the toxin. Chemical vapor has greater weight than air; there might be a higher concentration of it closer to the floor. Cam…”

I looked at him, inquiring, already folding up my robe inside-out to tuck neatly beneath the table.

The Warden grimaced and said, “You’re sweating.”

I did my own assessment and found that he was right. It wasn’t much, just a faint clamminess at my armpits and under my bandeau, but it was definitely perspiration. I said, “First symptom. Manifested between five and twenty minutes after initial exposure.”

The Warden said hopefully, “It might be physical exertion. You did carry me across the room.”

I gave him another look.

“Right. First symptom,” he agreed, and I could see his hands fluttering to write it down. I knew he carried a pencil, but neither of us had any flimsy on us, in accordance with examination rules. “Anything else? If we can limit the possibilities to a specific field…”

“Neuro and sensorimotor,” I said. When he blinked, I reminded him, “It’s my final examination, too.”

“So it is.” The Warden’s mouth thinned into a line that whitened his lips for a moment. “Let’s test for nerve response.”

He ran through his list of checks and I ran through mine, but my limbs and muscles obeyed me without any noticeable delay or weakness. The Warden tested involuntary responses when we’d finished, but there was no sign of impairment there, either.

“Not fast-acting, or else you got a low dose,” the Warden muttered, thinking aloud. “We should…” He stopped again, his gaze focusing. “Do you have a light?”

I did. It had served me well in the past to be prepared. He checked my eyes, shining the light into one and then the other, and his mouth thinned again. “Second symptom: Abnormal miosis.”

“That’s in line with a neurotoxin,” I confirmed, and tried not to sweat more than I already was. An emotional response would only impede our progress.

“I might’ve been wrong about it being slow-acting,” the Warden said. “Do me now.”

I refrained from making another comment, and shone the light in his eyes. Then I checked for perspiration. “Nothing yet.”

“Almost certainly exposure on arrival,” he muttered. “That’s why they delayed my coming in here. Pumped in through the ventilation system and out again in the fifteen minutes you were isolated.

“Speculation,” I felt obligated to say, although I suspected he was right. “They could have given you a head-start on symptoms.”

“If it’s a contact toxin, it won’t be in this room; I’ve touched everything you have. I don’t have enough to go on for an assessment. Let’s stick with aerosol or injection for now, and I’ll try the floor.”

\+ + +

The headache became noticeable at twenty-eight minutes after suspected exposure and was added to our list of symptoms. The Warden had peeled the label from the med kit and was painstakingly listing potential impairments on the sticky reverse.

An unpleasant thought occurred to me, as I caught myself poking at my stomach to check for abdominal pain and wondering if whatever I’d been dosed with would put me off my lunch.

“Eliminate anything acting over more than ninety minutes,” I told the Warden, who looked up at me from his growing list of possibilities and frowned.

“Standard dose? Do we really want to rule that much out at this point?”

I didn’t like it either, but the knot of nerves in my recently-poked stomach clenched in agreement. “I have an exam for Integumentary Studies at ten.” When the Warden continued to listen without reply, I reasoned, “They wouldn’t conclude the exam before we encountered the full range of symptoms, or we could appeal the results. Therefore, time from initial exposure to terminal must be within this exam period. I arrived at eight-thirty. With additional time for patient variability…”

“...They expect us to solve it within seventy-five minutes,” the Warden agreed. He hesitated, then said, “Or if we don’t, they’d have to intervene.”

I remained silent.

The Warden’s chin set stubbornly. “They wouldn’t let you die,” he argued. “What a colossal waste that would be. The examination boards would never allow it. Think of the paperwork.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Even so, there was a kernel of doubt niggling in the back of my mind, whispering that I’d signed the waiver. That this was the test.

“It won’t come to that anyway,” the Warden said, increasingly obdurate. “We’re going to solve it long before then.”

I still remained silent. He stared at me, refusing to cede the point, until I finally gave him a short nod.

“Go through this list with me,” said the Warden, pushing the label across to me and extracting his fingers from where they’d stuck to the glue. “Tell me everything I’ve missed.”

\+ + +

At thirty-five minutes past exposure, I began running drills on one side of the room. It wasn’t the same without the weight of a blade in each hand, perfectly-balanced extensions of my arms, but then I wasn’t moving through them just for the sake of drilling.

The Warden noticed what I was doing after a couple of minutes and watched me. He was surrounded by glyphs and his fingers were shiny with contact gel. “Try not to raise your heart rate,” he warned. “Increased circulation could accelerate the course of the toxin.”

I knew that, but it was a calculated risk. “I’m testing motor function.”

He had to know that as well, but refrained from comment. “Any change?”

It was difficult to tell, when I was second-guessing every move, but my body knew these drills so well that even the slightest lag in response stood out. I had a suspicion, but ran through two more drills three times over to confirm. “Left side potentially slow. Some muscle twitching.”

The Warden’s gaze sharpened. “Where?”

“My ass,” I told him, and lunged again.

“Maximus, medius, or minimus?”

I held my final position for two seconds and then dropped it and turned to face him. I was sweating again. “Does it matter?”

“No, probably not,” he admitted. “Are you finished? Come stand in this circle for a minute.”

I stood in the circle. He muttered and drew glyphs, and then reached out with his gel-slick fingers. He hesitated. I sighed, but only on the inside where he couldn’t see it.

“Cam. May I…?”

I didn’t bother to answer that, or to make him stumble through the question. Another time, it would have been funny. Another time, I hoped, it would still be funny, when we could look back on this moment and laugh about it. I rolled down the waistband of my trousers a couple of inches and twisted around, and the Warden put his forefinger and thumb on my bare skin as respectfully as it was possible to poke another person in the ass.

“Any chest pain or shortness of breath?” he asked after a moment, and I nearly answered in the negative before realizing that I was breathing harder than I should be after only three sets of drills. It surprised me enough that I didn’t respond, but he looked up at me from the floor and seemed to understand by my expression.

He picked up his pencil and made several notes on the med kit label, then crossed out one of the possibilities on our list. It was still, I noticed, a very long list.

For a moment, we both just looked at the list. I wasn’t sure either of us saw it. The Warden was uncharacteristically still, which made me want to move. I shouldn’t do any more drills now, though; he was right about that. I would do them at four-minute intervals to chart the progress of my breathing and muscle fatigue.

The Warden suddenly yanked his spectacles off his face and cleaned them savagely. “They have to know I’ll never forgive them for this. If you really get sick, I won’t collaborate with anyone on this panel for the rest of their careers.”

He didn’t say ‘if you die’, but I was pretty sure we were both thinking it.

This had occurred to me as well, but I’d had more time to think through it. “I don’t think they need you to,” I told him. “This isn’t about grade points anymore. They want to be sure you’ll survive, whatever comes.”

The Warden shoved his spectacles back onto his face and looked up at me with burning gray eyes. “It’s both of us or neither,” he said. “One flesh, one end.”

I didn’t need to say it back to him. The Warden already knew. I didn’t say either that of the two of us, I was the expendable one to everyone but him. If they’d offered me the choice of signing a waiver or having the Warden sign one instead, I knew what I’d have chosen without even stopping to think about it.

The Warden was still looking at me, and while I didn’t need to say it, I realized that maybe he needed to hear it. “One flesh,” I said. “One end.”

“Damn right,” said the Warden, and got back to work.

\+ + +

After the third drill sequence, I was soaked with sweat and losing coordination. “Forty-four minutes after exposure,” I reported, heaving for breath. “Stomach pain and nausea.”

“Oh, for...Cam, get on the table,” ordered the Warden. His tone was mostly exasperated, but I could hear the worry underneath it. “I need you to do this with me, I can’t have you passing out making sword loops.”

I stared at him. He made a gesture that was apparently meant to be a sword loop, then held out both hands to help me up onto the treatment table. I was annoyed to find that I needed the assistance. I could have made it on my own, I thought critically, but the effort would have made it harder to breathe afterward, and my left leg was unreliable. The muscles wouldn’t stop twitching.

“You know what comes next,” I warned him, because I needed both of us to be prepared for it. We were fairly sure of the progression now, and had extrapolated a probable timetable.

“It’s not going to come to that,” said the Warden, but I’d done the calculations twice, and estimated it was two-to-seven minutes before I began seizing. I tried to tear a strip from my shirt, but my muscles wouldn’t obey, and I didn’t have the strength to break the stitching.

“Give me your belt,” I told the Warden, who protested, but I overrode him. “Now.”

It tasted terrible - the Warden didn’t always remember about laundry, or changing clothes, especially in the middle of final exams - but that gave me something to think about and focus on, instead of the inevitability of losing control of my own body.

“We need to go through it again,” said the Warden. He was close by my side, but not where I could see him, and I rolled my eyes toward him until he moved into my line of sight. “There have to be more impairments we can rule out, which will give us more time to focus on the others.”

I nodded, and he began to read through the list. Then, three-and-a-half minutes after I’d stolen his belt, I moved into the next stage of the progression.

Awareness came and went, but in moments of coherence I reported what I could, and when even that failed me, I held onto consciousness by listening to the Warden talking furiously as he ran through tests, making sure I knew I wasn’t alone.

“Thanergy,” I managed at some point. “Cell death.”

“I’m already studying it,” he answered, and when I gripped his arm, he finally took my meaning. “No. I won’t steal the life from you.”

“Not saying steal it,” I countered with effort. “Use it.”

I thought he must have, because he was also moving things around inside me, easing the pressure in my chest and the twisting pain in my stomach. He couldn’t do anything for the headache, or if he did, it was still bad enough that I couldn’t tell.

“Why, Cam?” he demanded at one point, and I realized he was squeezing my hand, both of us now slippery with contact gel. “Why did you sign it?”

He meant the waiver. I could have told him a lot of things, but I was too tired for anything but the truth. “I knew you’d solve it,” I told him, and then the world darkened again from gray to black.

\+ + +

When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the exam room. I wasn’t in my shuck, either, or the Warden’s. My chest felt a little better, like there was no longer a shuttle docked on top of it, and the stabbing pain in my head had receded. I tested muscle response by wiggling my toes and flexing my fingers, and finally rolled my head around on my neck to see where I’d been put.

It was one of the recovery alcoves in the medical bay, I could tell by the hideous blue-and-gray-patterned curtains. The Warden and I had come down with dyakis bronchiolitis once and been bored out of our minds for eight days while we recuperated; the curtains were burned into my memory.

There was a light tap on the bed frame, and then the Warden’s face appeared as he tugged aside one end of the curtain.

“You’re awake,” he said, and the undercurrent of relief in his voice made me wonder if I almost hadn’t been. He’d still had eighteen minutes, the last time I remembered checking, but I’d been missing things toward the end.

“Water,” I requested, and he helped me to sit up and drink.

“You were right about Integumentary Studies,” he said. “They’ve offered to reschedule, but they won’t let me move mine, so I’ve got to go in a few minutes. I didn’t want to leave before you woke up, though.”

I recognized the mulish set of his chin and knew what he wasn’t saying. He wouldn’t have left my side until I woke up, even if it meant failing an examination. Even if it delayed his graduation, and the girl who waited for him, clinging to life as he feverishly searched for a way to anchor her to it.

“Tessera-Helix or triplo variation?” I asked, heaving myself further upright by using the Warden for leverage. We’d narrowed it down considerably in those last minutes I remembered, and given my rapid recovery after treatment, I could now eliminate several more.

“Triplo,” answered the Warden on an exhale. “I couldn’t work out which one it was, so I tried all of them.”

There were nine recorded variations. I gave him an incredulous look. He returned my gaze, unexpectedly somber.

“You didn’t have time,” he answered my unspoken question. “And I didn’t care whether they took points for it or not.”

“Did they?” I asked, curious. If he hadn’t successfully diagnosed the variation, the assessment board might not give him full credit.

The Warden shrugged. “I’ll find out when they release the results. Are you up for the exam? We’ve got four minutes.”

I flexed my hands again, relieved that my muscles were entirely back under my control. “I can make it. At least it’s not the mysterious circle.”

“You’d still pass,” the Warden said staunchly, and offered me the cup of water again. “You’d pass them all.”

My gaze flicked to his. “Do you think we passed this one?”

He was silent for a long moment. “I’m not sure I know what they were really testing us on.” After a moment, he added, “And I don’t like the implications.”

I squeezed his wrist and used him as a lever again, swinging my legs over the side of the bunk and checking my balance. “They won’t try it again.” I felt fairly certain of that. Whatever they’d been testing, they should have their answer now.

“Did they make you clean the exam room?” I asked to change the subject. We’d left bone chalk everywhere, not to mention the torn-apart med kit and disassembled air vent.

“Not yet.” He sounded cheerful about it, like he’d gotten away with something, which I suspected was an act for my benefit. “There was a portable decontamination chamber set up on the way out, so they might be waiting for the air scrubbers to cycle.”

I hopped out of my bunk and tested my legs, which seemed willing to carry my weight. The Warden walked with me out of the medical bay and down the hall.

“Your next exam’s in the other direction,” I pointed out. “You might be late.”

“Then I’ll be late,” he said, and there was something hard and inflexible in his voice that I didn’t challenge. It was gone in the next moment when he said more brightly, “We’re lucky it wasn’t enneaplotoxin. I’d no idea how to treat that one. I don’t think Ninth strains have been on the course syllabus for ages.”

I didn’t miss his use of the past tense. He might not have known the treatment when we were in that exam room, but he’d had time while waiting for me to wake up. He would know it now.

“We need to be prepared,” said the Warden. “If anything…”

He didn’t finish that; he didn’t need to. I knew what he meant. He wouldn’t say ‘next time’, either; he would make sure there wouldn’t be one.

“We’ll be ready,” he said instead, and I didn’t doubt him.


End file.
